The morning news. [volume] (Savannah, Ga.) 1887-1900, 1887-06-16
SARAH AS A CRITIC.
Nine. Bernhar6t Gives Her Views on
Americans.

Nine. Bernhar0t Gives Her Views on
Americans.
A dispatch from Chicago to the New
York Herald says:
Mon Dieu, mon Dieu, je suiS .furi-
euse."
And Nine. Bernhartt looked it, too.
She dropped in for special matinee on
Thursday. Her audience had been numer-
Gus, distinguished and enthusiastic After
the performance crowd of prominent la
dies thronged her dressing room, saying and
paying all sorts of graceful. compliments.
One lovely girl begged for a flower, another
TOR picture, a third kissed her hand on
leaving.
This little afterpiece made the great ac-
treSSs recall that she had been represented as
saying some unkind things of some of her
American audiences
| And the thought made her .fttrietSe, be-
cause she asserts she never made that re-
| mark
In that quick, terse way of hers she told
her Impressions with seeming frankneSs and
| evident feeling. Her half hour chat was
like chapter from Musset or Feuillet
Sh~ had found the people of America but
little affected in essential characteristics by
the peculiar local conditions Of different sec
lions of the country. Like all new and Wig
sensitive, full of response
Critics by nature rather than nurture,n
| she put it.
And the city dwellers-they differ not at
all from those of the provinces
oh, but you have no provinces in Ameri-
ca We have them in the older countries,
where the towns and hamlets are full of
| people who are born, bred and buried with
out ever thought of the life beyond the
ha x.hp h.a
| provincial here must be hermit,
Not, of course, that they are all like peas
in the pod. One cannot see clearly over the
| footllghtS, but one can feel without him
| drance For example, the Bostonians, |
should say are bizarre, the Phiadelphians,
people who smile instead of laughing who
| would whisper Very good instead of shout
| ing 'Blava'"
Aud the New Yorker, madamem
"Ah, the New Yorker is the Partisan, the
cosinopolite, a little of everything. If you
| should pick him apart and scatter the pieces
over the world each one would probably
feel at home wherever it happened to find
| itSelfn
Plainly, then, man after your own
heart.n
"You must count the women in, too
they are the cleverest half of American So
ciety"
"You have no preference, then. in your
estimate of American communities"
II confess | have-the Californians are
charming people. They made me think of
our own sunny France. San Francisco was
| like Marseilles. 1t is the blood of Provence
in those people, out there by the Pacific.
They have the Southern sky end the torrid
temper that goes with it. From that coun-
try is going TO come your poets and painters
and musicians, Genius is born in clover as
the Genoese have it, aud out there genius
| can browse on the sweetest clover that ever
blushed in Italy. Great people. a grand
people, Mime. Bernhardt added after a
pause.
CERTAINLY NOT.
"Foreign artists have said all that before,
madame. The Americans say you visitors
compliment us when here and chaff us when
you get homer
"No, no, no, no, nor she answered, holly
81 mean it-every word of it, l am talking
as a woman, not as an actress. These peo
pie need no patronizing from me and need
no undeserved patronage from them. We
are mere episodes TO one another. This trip
to America has made me happy as an ar
tiste. Whether have made as much money
as on my first visit, six years ago, is the con-
Germ of my manager Then the people came
to see how | looked; this time they came to
see how | acted.
81 90 home next Saturday with the
thought that in times to come Americans
will say, She was great actress and not
How thin she was
II say with honesty that like these peo-
pie. Here and there ] may have had an au-
dience who failed to touch me, probably be-
cause for some reason / failed to touch
them. / frankly said what | thought of
them But am speaking now of a people,
not of an audience. / have enjoyed the
hospitality of the Americans, and they have
been kind to me.
II babe them come and see a foreign
speaking actress interpret foreign ideas of
dramatic art.
That is enough evidence of my estimate
of their intelligence"
Nine. Bernhardt seemed thoroughly in
earnest. and who knows but what she was
when quit the stage she concluded,
81 am going to write books. Then see what
l say about Americans"
mn